The anatomical position of the genitalia gives females total sexual control over who is allowed to mate with them.

It's length is variable, and considered a secondary sexual trait as well.

bigger the better.

There is a professor of behavioral ecology/psychology (Steve Glickman) at Berkeley who specializes in studying hyena social behavior.

He's raised some of them from babes, and they readily accept him as part of the "pack".

fascinating animals, really (well, the spotted ones anyway, striped hyenas are kinda shy and boring, IMO). I recall spending time watching him work with the animals directly at the facility up in Strawberry Canyon. Not only unusual social behavior based on entirely matriarchal heirarchies, but the vocalizations are quite complex as well.

On the other hand, let’s look at an evolution example. An evolutionist uses DNA sequence data to construct phylogenies. First, the data are processed to cull homologous sequences, thus rejecting differences. Then the analysis is rerun several times to hone the results, and remaining outliers are explained as a consequence hypothetical evolutionary scenarios. The results are published, and later become strong evidence for evolution and we use them to confirm our flimsy conclusions.

There's a lot to say about this paragraph, but since I'm tired and irritable, I'll give you time to support this statement if you wish. Just two questions:

If molecular phylogenies are simply exercises in forcing the evidence to match preconceived ideas, then:

Which animal has the stronger bite: the hyena, or the American Pit Bull/Staffordshire Terrier? Does anybody have any data on this? Is there even a reliable way to measure bite strength? Just curious, cause I hear so many different claims.

Which animal has the stronger bite: the hyena, or the American Pit Bull/Staffordshire Terrier? Does anybody have any data on this? Is there even a reliable way to measure bite strength? Just curious, cause I hear so many different claims.

I've heard that there isn't any way of measuring bite strength (from folks opposing breed-specific legislation). I suppose one could measure the amount of pressure put on something as a dog/hyena bites it, but I imagine getting the animal to bite as hard as possible might be difficult.

--------------"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" -Calvin

Which animal has the stronger bite: the hyena, or the American Pit Bull/Staffordshire Terrier? Does anybody have any data on this? Is there even a reliable way to measure bite strength? Just curious, cause I hear so many different claims.

yes, you can measure bite strength with a pressure sensitive strip. Often, it is encased inside a malleable cylinder. You have to calculate the proper position to place it to get maximum bite strength, which is often the most difficult thing when comparing one animal to another.

it's been done for lots of animals, though I haven't done a search to see if the results are on a website somewhere.

that said, I've never seen a pit bull that was able to crack a bone the diameter of a human thigh bone with a single bite.

my money would be on the hyena.

a quick google search shows MANY studies on bite strength; if you have access, there are several studies on hyena bite strength mentioned.

oh, here's a video showing the mechanism commonly used to measure bite force, along with (in the first part of the video) a clip from a nat geo show that came out a while back where some dufus (Jim Fowler, maybe?) got paid to go all over the world to measure bite strengths.

note in the chart that domestic dogs are typically measured at around 330, while hyenas are around 1000.

I saw a program in which they were measuring the bite strength of snapping turtles. One of the things they found was that the bite of turtles in the wild was MUCH greater than that of ones in zoos. So I would expect that getting any particular animal - especially a domsticated one - to bite as hard as it can would be problematic.

--------------

Quote (afdave @ Oct. 02 2006,18:37)

Many Jews were in comfortable oblivion about Hitler ... until it was too late.Many scientists will persist in comfortable oblivion about their Creator ... until it is too late.

There is no accurate way to determine the pressure of a dog's bite. Although there have been studies to attempt to answer this question, the PSI (pounds per square inch) tends to vary greatly depending on who you talk to. In many cases the number seems to have been completely made up, or pulled from a source (i.e. newspaper) that has invented some ridiculously high number. I have heard: 1000 PSI, 1800 PSI, 2000 PSI, and "10 times the strength of Rottweiler jaws". None of this is based in reality.

In real life a dog's bite strength is determined by a wide variety of factors. While these include the dog's size and individual jaw strength, the severity of a bite is primarily determined by the dog's intent (i.e. aggression, fear, warning snap, playful nip), the victim's behavior (twisting or yanking the body part being bitten can increase the damage), the dog's training, and so on. Scientific experiments indicate that trained bite dogs (including pits) can bite at a little over 300 PSI maximum.

This was my question. There are many, many more examples of similarities that do not fit the common descent pattern. Why are those that can be fitted to the common descent pattern cited as such powerful evidence? Without some justification, this fundamental claim of evolution appears to be selective. Unfortunately, good justification is hard to come by. The vast majority of the responses simply avoided the question and made up their own.

I'd be interested to see these "examples of similarities that do not fit the common descent pattern." Are you saying you've identified unambiguous violations of nested hierarchies? I'd be surprised to find that there are known falsifications of common descent with modification. Such falsifications would, of course, fatally undermine the Theory of Evolution in its entirety.

Are you sure that's what you're talking about here? Or are you talking about apparent violations of nested hierarchies. Convergent evolution may make it difficult to construct accurate phylogenentic trees, but you sound like you've found something that makes it impossible to construct such trees. Are you sure that's what you mean?

--------------2006 MVD award for most dogged defense of scientific sanity

"Atheism is a religion the same way NOT collecting stamps is a hobby." —Scott Adams

I'd be interested to see these "examples of similarities that do not fit the common descent pattern."

Me too.

Alas, though, Doc Hunter is apparently, like every other IDer I've ever run into, lethally allergic to answering direct questions. Almost as if he, ya know, has something he needs to hide, or something.

(I mean something OTHER than the fact that he's too uninformed to tell the difference between "homologous" and "analogous". . . . .)

On the other hand, let’s look at an evolution example. An evolutionist uses DNA sequence data to construct phylogenies. First, the data are processed to cull homologous sequences, thus rejecting differences. Then the analysis is rerun several times to hone the results, and remaining outliers are explained as a consequence hypothetical evolutionary scenarios. The results are published, and later become strong evidence for evolution and we use them to confirm our flimsy conclusions.

There's a lot to say about this paragraph, but since I'm tired and irritable, I'll give you time to support this statement if you wish. Just two questions:

If molecular phylogenies are simply exercises in forcing the evidence to match preconceived ideas, then:

On the other hand, let’s look at an evolution example. An evolutionist uses DNA sequence data to construct phylogenies. First, the data are processed to cull homologous sequences, thus rejecting differences. Then the analysis is rerun several times to hone the results, and remaining outliers are explained as a consequence hypothetical evolutionary scenarios. The results are published, and later become strong evidence for evolution and we use them to confirm our flimsy conclusions.

What an ignorant fool.

He must have gone to the Paul Nelson school of molecular phylogenetics.

Nelson once claimed that the order in which a taxon is placed in a dataset and then aligned will dictate its position in the phylogeny, that experimenter bias essentially produces the desired outcome.

So, I took a dataset that I had been working on at the time, scrambled the order of the taxa in the alignment, coded their names, and removed all gaps. I offered to send him this dataset, provided links to free software with which he could align them himself, and to free phylogenetic software that he could then run his dataset through. I wrote that if his outcome was different than the outcomes that I got with that dataset, then he might have a point worth discussing.

But...

Darn it, he just didn't have the time...

... to test his claim....

But he went right on making it.

The more I read, the more I am convinced that these people are just plain old pathological liars.

Every single one of those topics include at least one, and sometimes several, links to his own pathetic blaggery. Looks like Corny is taking lessons from Densye on how to use UD in a pitifully blatant attempt to direct traffic to their own blogs.

--------------The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny is alleviated by their lack of consistency. -A. Einstein (H/T, JAD)
If evolution is true, you could not know that it's true because your brain is nothing but chemicals. ?Think about that. -K. Hovind

Every single one of those topics include at least one, and sometimes several, links to his own pathetic blaggery.

Thus, we can be optimistic that he will copy his recent Pyknon prediction that he alredy linked copied to ENV will show up at UD. Of course he doesn't mention that the Pyknon concept has been criticized:

Quote

An example of underestimating the probability of frequent word occurrences is apparent in a recent study by Rigoutsos et al [16]. They reported that certain DNA words, termed pyknons, appear frequently in human gene-related sequences andin noncoding regions, in restricted configurations, and presented many arguments for the pyknon’s functionality. By relying on a Bernoulli model, they reasoned that 16-mers should appear in a random genome sequence more than forty times with a probability <10-32. Such a word frequency, however, is not as extraordinary if we take into account the universal shape of genomic spectra. A DPL distribution fitted to the human genome spectrum yields a P-value of 0.001 (see Supplementary Material).This latter translates to about four million 16-mers that are expected to occur at least forty times in a random genome-sized sequence. Strikingly, at least 460 thousand frequent words appear already in the repeat-masked sequence as accidental constituents of the fitted distribution’s heavy tail.

--------------"[...] the type of information we find in living systems is beyond the creative means of purely material processes [...] Who or what is such an ultimate source of information? [...] from a theistic perspective, such an information source would presumably have to be God."

learned-hand: Zachriel, I believe you're being successfully trolled. Has Ilion said anything with any content at all in this thread? No response can be anything more than a jumping-off point for more angry, empty rhetoric.

Who would have thought!?

As for being "successfully" trolled, that requires having provoked a reaction rather than a response. Fortunately, our patented {not really}DeSnark® desnarkification field suppressor (remark desnider) limits the amount of trolling emissions before viewing. Here's an example.

Quote

Ilion (no filter): Of course! How trollish of me to help the "Darwinists" demonstrate to one and all that they do not reason.

Quote

Ilion (filtered at 70%): Sorry. I'm not following your argument.

Special appreciation to learned-hand and Alan Fox for outing Ilion's trolling behavior.

--------------Zachriel, angel that rules over memory, presides over the planet Jupiter.Member AMF, Angelic Motive ForcePushing planets on celestial spheres â€” one epoch at a time.

Ilion is a fun one. He came up with a "disproof" of evolution (regarding the human chromosome 2 fusion) in some gaming forum years ago), and has been traveling from forum to forum peddling it ever since. His argument has been dismantled several times by different people, but when that happens he just leaves (because he just can't stand "intellectual dishonesty", you see) and finds another where the members haven't seen his pet argument demolished.

Here is a thread on ARN where I dealt with him, and here is a blog where he tried it again ( a friend who frequents the blog noticed his presence and let me know).

He is nasty piece of work, but easily refuted. The trouble is, many laypeople are impressed by his 'sciency' schtick.

Edited by KCdgw on Feb. 28 2010,15:17

--------------Those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it-- Confucius

I haven't read this entire thread. Has someone made the Hunter-Byers link? Too obvious to miss, really, innit.

--------------"But it's disturbing to think someone actually thinks creationism -- having put it's hand on the hot stove every day for the last 400 years -- will get a different result tomorrow." -- midwifetoad

I haven't read this entire thread. Has someone made the Hunter-Byers link? Too obvious to miss, really, innit.

I was about to suggest that your hypothesis could be refuted by the simple fact that no one could fake the word salad that is Byers's prose. Then I realized I wasn't thinking in the 21st century. Maybe Hunter is using one of those online translation programs to go from English to ? and back to English. Someone should try that with a known sample of Hunter's writing and see how it compares.

--------------"Creationists think everything Genesis says is true. I don't even think Phil Collins is a good drummer." --J. Carr

I haven't read this entire thread. Has someone made the Hunter-Byers link? Too obvious to miss, really, innit.

I was about to suggest that your hypothesis could be refuted by the simple fact that no one could fake the word salad that is Byers's prose. Then I realized I wasn't thinking in the 21st century. Maybe Hunter is using one of those online translation programs to go from English to ? and back to English. Someone should try that with a known sample of Hunter's writing and see how it compares.

Apparently you have never read anything by Denyse O'Leary - Canadian journalist and editor. Contributes to UD a lot. Rumored to be an Inuit morphodyke...

--------------Church burning ebola boy

FTK: I Didn't answer your questions because it beats the hell out of me.

PaV: I suppose for me to be pried away from what I do to focus long and hard on that particular problem would take, quite honestly, hundreds of thousands of dollars to begin to pique my interest.